The disappearance of people is a “persistent” problem in Mexico and Central America and leaves the families of the victims vulnerable, the International Committee of Human Rights warned this Thursday. Red Cross (ICRC) at a meeting on the subject in Guatemala.
Every year, thousands of people disappear in the region due to political persecution, dangerous migration routes to Mexico and the United Stateshuman trafficking and organized crime that cause complications in the search processes for relatives, according to the Red Cross.
“The phenomenon is persistent in the region and manifests itself in different ways and leaves families very unprotected,” the regional coordinator of the ICRC’s missing persons search program for Mexico and Central America, Frenchman Jerémy Renaux, told AFP, who regretted that there is no official data.
In many “countries there is still a lot of fear on the part of families of suffering reprisals or revictimization when reporting their cases to the authorities” and that is why they do not do so, added Renaux at the meeting that brought together several relatives of missing persons.
Families of missing persons from El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico and Guatemala participated in the three-day conference in the indigenous town of Santiago Sacatepéquez, west of Guatemala City.
“The only thing I want in the world is to see myself in my son’s eyes again. I was 14 years old. I was a child,” Mexican Emma Mora told AFP when remembering the disappearance of her son José Alberto in 2011 in the resort of Acapulco (south), a possible victim of drug trafficking violence.
Meanwhile, Salvadoran Maritxa Menjívar does not lose hope of finding her husband Antonio Abrego, who disappeared in August 2020 after entering US soil irregularly.
According to Renaux, in Mexico there are a total of 133,624 missing people since the 1950s, while in Central America there is a “fragmentation” of official data.
El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras lack a law on missing persons that recognizes the rights of both the missing person and their family members, so there are no clear obligations of the authorities, Renaux lamented.
